Darryl Glenn, Republican candidate for U.S. Senate from Colorado addressing Republican National Convention in Cleveland, July 18, 2016. Scott Applewhite / Press Association. All rights reserved.So many of
the warnings and insights, historic parallels and cautions in Jim Sleeper’s
March essay in Salon and AlterNet on what Trump's rise portends for America,
even if he loses, are vindicated by this week’s Republican Party convention in
Cleveland that openDemocracy has invited him to update it to take account of
what's unfolding now, at this critical turning point for the United
States. (Just under 7,000
words).
As Darryl Glenn, a Republican candidate for the US Senate
from Colorado, fired up the Republican National Convention against Hillary Clinton this
week by saying, “We know she enjoys her
pantsuits, but we should send her an email telling her what she deserves is a
bright orange jumpsuit,” I pictured the beheadings of western foreign-aid
workers in orange jumpsuits, as Glenn surely meant us to do, and I wondered why
this black herald of a new Republican Party didn’t say that Barack Obama
deserves to be lynched.
Glenn’s
audience went wild at his jumpsuit suggestion, leaping and shouting in an unintended
demonstration that our national crisis isn’t really about Trump; it’s about
what’s happening to the American people. What’s happening to us is what’s being
done to us, and Trump, the
outsider-insider, is exposing it more vividly than Clinton has done.
Because he’s a compulsive marketer, not a producer or a leader,
he can’t truly assess the crisis or offer solutions more substantive than empty
slogans. But, like a flare, he lights up, at least momentarily, what others
have kept dark. For example, as he swept four Republican state primaries on March
17, he did what presidential candidates seldom do: he named huge corporations —
Apple, Pfizer and other wardens of this country’s ever-stronger Silicon Valley
and Big Pharma cages — as ripe for discipline by government, thereby exposing
the hypocrisies of both political parties’ establishments, without showing how
he’d curb conglomerates’ cartel-like consolidations, tax evasions and
inversions, and degradations of employees’ prospects.
Bernie Sanders assailed Verizon in his final debate with Clinton,
who maintained a purse-lipped silence on that company’s worker-busting CEO, who
is among her donors. What Trump and hangers-on like Darryl Glenn do more
effectively than Sanders did is stoke fear and rage, not hope, in the betrayed
and bereft. And they target that rage against Democrats who are just as
complicit as Republicans in financializing and corporatizing a political system
that has become illegitimate, unsustainable, and delusional. What Trump and
hangers-on like Darryl Glenn do more effectively than Sanders did is stoke fear
and rage, not hope, in the betrayed and bereft.
Trump doesn’t dispel delusions; he shuffles them like
flashcards, holding them up to the light for an instant before changing the
subject, but doing just that has shaken up and discredited some
almost-comically rigid conservative Republican doctrines. As recently as eight
months ago, the party’s primary debates seemed little more than a repeat
performance of the opera bouffe of
2012, whose cacophonous chorus line of presidential hopefuls resembled a large
troupe of clowns piling out of a tiny car in the circus and mounting the stage where
Newt Gingrich proposed that Americans colonize the moon and Ron Paul retorted
that the only justification for such a venture would be “to send all the
politicians up there.”
Most candidates in 2012 really did seem to have come from
the moon as they prattled on about putting people’s money back in their pockets
and rewarding their heroism in Iraq, even as many in the audience faced
declining incomes, home foreclosures, the war’s lies and wounds, and the
attendant perversities that are erupting daily into American civic and social
life. Yet millions of citizens, not to mention hundreds of journalists, took
the prattle seriously, as if it might explain what has befallen us.
This year, however Trump turned the Republican clown show
into a freak in his zeal to stage the horror show against Clinton that the
Republican Convention is becoming. The party’s hollowed-out hacks, from Paul Ryan and
Mitch McConnell to Bob Dole, have sunk to projecting unity against other
Americans whom they’re outfitting in jumpsuits. The campaign we’re about to
endure was anticipated acutely last spring by Nathan J. Robinson, editor of the
new Current Affairs magazine and a Harvard doctoral student who’s also a
brilliant mimic. He imagined his way into Trump’s mind and mouth with a
caricature of what Trump may well say when he debates Clinton:
“She lies so much. Everything she says
is a lie. I’ve never seen someone who lies so much in my life. Let me tell you
three lies she’s told. She made up a story about how she was ducking sniper fire! There was no sniper
fire. She made it up! How do you forget a thing like that? She said she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary, the guy who climbed Mount Everest.
He hadn’t even climbed it when she was born! Total lie! She lied about the emails, of course, as we all know, and is probably going to be indicted.
You know she said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq! It was a lie!
Thousands of American soldiers are dead because of her. Not only does she lie,
her lies kill people. That’s four lies, I said I’d give you three. You can’t
even count them. You want to go on PolitiFact, see how many lies she has? It takes you an hour to read them all! In fact, they ask
her, she doesn’t even say she hasn’t lied. They asked her straight up, she says she usually tries to tell the truth! Ooooh, she tries!
Come on! This is a person, every single word out of her mouth is a lie. Nobody
trusts her. Check the polls, nobody trusts her. Yuuge liar.”
Never mind that “When PolitiFact was choosing its “lie of
the year,” it found that that all its real contenders were Trump statements —
so it collected his many campaign misstatements and gave them all the ‘lie of
the year’ award,” as Nicholas Kristof noted. The cumulative effect of Trump’s
torrent of accusations is The Big Lie technique, perfected in modern times by
Joseph Goebbels, adapted in America by Joseph McCarthy. Hundreds of
journalists took the prattle seriously, as if it might explain what has
befallen us.
Heated comparisons of Trump to Hitler do have a measure of
validity; Trump isn’t as possessed and maniacal as der Fuhrer, but he opens long-festering wounds and stirs swift,
dark undercurrents that all the other presidential candidates except Sanders have
danced around without really touching.
While Sanders played to democratic strengths and hopes,
Trump has played mindlessly and malevolently to fear and rage, stoking what is
known as ressentiment, in ways I want
to describe. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and
my supporters wouldn’t leave me,” he has said, and his Hitler-like boasts and insults
have shot new holes in the liberal democratic fabric of dialogue and trust. His
way of talking separates words from deeds more brazenly than most folkloric
American political snake-oil salesmen and sleazy senators ever did, leaving the
words more empty, the deeds more brutal, and those of us who try to put words
on things more breathless than ever before.
He has also played cunningly on many people’s craving to be
flattered and deluded into imagining themselves free when they’re being
enslaved. In this, he’s somewhat closer to the wily Augustus, Rome’s first
emperor and unctuous grave-digger of its republic, than he is to Hitler.
Augustus’ wily transformation of republican citizens into subjects is recounted
in Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire, which the American republic’s founders were reading as it was
coming off the presses in the 1770s.
The founders were taking a hard look at their fellow
Americans and were becoming obsessed with how a republic ends. Gibbon, a deft a
polemicist as well as an historian, showed them that many people will surrender
its freedom not only to a violent coup but also to a charismatic leader’s smile
and friendly swagger if they’ve become tired of the burdens of self-government
and can be jollied into servitude – or scared into it, once it has become soft
enough.
This week, Trump’s crafty, Augustan pretensions will be on
stage, too. Gibbon
noted that Augustus “wished to deceive the people by an image of civil
liberty,” knowing as he did that “the senate and people would submit to
slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their
ancient freedom.”
Augustus guessed rightly because “the
provinces, long oppressed by the ministers of the republic, sighed for the
government of a single person, who would be the master, not the accomplice, of
those petty tyrants. The people of Rome, viewing, with a secret pleasure the
humiliation of the aristocracy, demanded only bread and public shows; and were
supplied with both by the liberal hand of Augustus.”
Since the primaries, Trump has provided those spectacles of
humiliation in abundance. But let’s try to catch our breaths and look carefully
at what he has already done to public discourse and at how he has exposed the
vacuum that already replaced what Americans once considered trustworthy
political, cultural and, civic-minded business leadership. Then let’s examine
how American leaders’ defaults have hurt voters whose confidence they’ve relied
on, stimulating instead a self-perpetuating syndrome of resentment that’s as toxic
as racism or McCarthyism and that is becoming more diffuse and free-floating.
We are passing a tipping point: the new American ressentiment that’s on display in
Cleveland, as it has been in the streets all over this country, unlikely to be
repaired or put into remission, much less reversed, even if Trump’s campaign
implodes. So let’s keep focused on what his rise has exposed not only about him
but about the broad swath of the American people who are responding so
virulently to him.
The derangement of democratic discourse
Law enforcement stands watch near large poster of Donald Trump at Public Square on July 19, 2016, in Cleveland, second day of the Republican convention. Patrick Semansky / Press Association. All rights reserved.Trump’s behavior has highlighted the difference between what
children say and do on playgrounds, where they rough out rules for civility and
cooperation, and what grown-ups are supposed to have learned and become
committed to do to make a society work. The difference between Trump’s kind of
free speech and the kind that actually enhances freedom isn’t a legal one but a
psychological and cultural one: adults understand that what the Constitution
rightly protects legally, civil society rightly modulates and anyone who lowers
adult public conversation to the level of “So’s your Mom!” is dragging us all
down.
Trump’s brand of discourse is even worse than that of the
playground. When he said that he could shoot someone without losing public
support, he certainly excited the roiling horde of “militia” members,
authoritarian police, enthusiasts of “Stand Your Ground” and “Concealed Carry”
laws and border walls, mass shooters (who in their derangement are sometimes
attuned more acutely to the subliminal signals a society is sending.)
Ranting like his offends not only the decorously well-organized
rich but also the more “liberal minded,” because he “cares nothing for
reproaches that he is a criminal or a guttersnipe…. Where [he] knifes his
opponents is by disarming them with a cynicism and stabbing them with a
morality, [H]e twists and turns, flatters and gibes, lulls and murders. ….He
raves about ‘the brutal and rude unscrupulousness of the parliamentary
panders.’ He calls them job-hunters scoundrels, villains, rascals,
criminals. He screams that ‘in comparison with these traitors to the nation,
every pimp is a gentleman.’”
Not only that, “he boasts of his tricks: ‘Take me or leave
me, my object, the resurrection of the … people, is so much more superb than
any contrary principle that to bridle me with morals or sentiment is to lose…”
This plausible elaboration of Trump’s slogan, “Make America
Great Again!” could have been written by a discerning observer of his methods,
such as George Will or Tom Friedman. But it was written by the writer Francis
Hackett, in a forgotten but still-arresting book, “What Mein Kampf Means to
America,” which he published in April 1941, when many Americans still excused der Fuhrer’s demagogic vitality,
vulgarity and brutality and when many American businessmen thought they could
still make deals with him.
It was the German people, of course, not the American, whom
Hitler sought to resurrect, and he may have been something of a brute and a
clown. But after all, Americans rationalized, Herr Hitler is taking on the
scourge of bolshevism and shaking up the corrupt, old European conceits and
arrangements that have clung to power even since causing the Great War and the
Great Depression. Drawing historical analogies is a dangerous game. But it would
be just as dangerous to ignore history’s cautions unless one is bent on
repeating its follies.
If Trump himself were a little more grandiloquent, he might
justify his own demagoguery by adding that “all great movements are movements
of the people, are volcanic eruptions of human passions…, and are not the
lemonade-like outpourings of aestheticizing literati and drawing room heroes.”
Ah, but those words were written by Hitler himself, in “Mein Kampf,” in 1926.
Is that really so surprising? When Trump commingles racist nationalism by
promising a wall to keep out Mexican rapists and Muslim terrorists with what
sounds almost like socialism by promising a cornucopia of “jobs, jobs, jobs”
and full healthcare for Americans, he reminds me that “Nazi” was an acronym for
National Socialism.
Drawing historical analogies is a dangerous game. But it would
be just as dangerous to ignore history’s cautions unless one is bent on
repeating its follies. To understand the difference between Trump’s
understanding of freedoms of speech and entrepreneurship and the kind that
American civic-republican civil society would nurture if those freedoms weren’t
being eviscerated by the marketing riptides he’s riding, contrast Trump’s claim
that “he gets things done” while lesser people dither with the following poignant
observation about civil society that “SPHealy,” an online commenter, posted
beneath something I wrote in 2007.
“Back in the playground days we used to play basketball with
whoever was on hand: 2-on-2, 3-on-2, 7-on-6, whatever. And people would
rearrange and switch sides as needed to keep things even and fun. We were quite
competitive and loved to win, but we were playing against our neighbors and
schoolmates who were not necessarily our friends (and might even have been our
enemies) but with whom we knew we needed to maintain at least non-destructive
relationships for 7 or 8 more years. It takes one to know one, and the
other plutocrats loathe him, but they deserve him.
“The problem is that such a system requires that all parties
have a fundamental allegiance to getting along, and specifically to handling losses
without developing longstanding brutal grudges. If a small group had ever
gotten together and made an agreement to subvert the system and behave
destructively in a coordinated manner, they could have done a lot of damage
before the rest of us figured out what was happening – and then our only
alternative would have been to terminate the system. If trust had been
destroyed it could not have been replaced. Strong as our Constitutional system
is, I don’t think it was ever intended to resist a large-scale, long-term,
tightly-organized effort to subvert it from within.”
Many elite conservative efforts have been large-scale,
long-term and tightly organized, nowhere more so than in the legislative
districting scams described by David Daley in his new book Ratf**ked, which shows why nothing that happens in this year’s
election can possibly loosen Republicans’ grip on the House of Representatives
for the next decade or two.
But Trump, that loose cannon, has blown open many of the
elites’ other decorous, civic-republican covers and agendas, exposing them as
the myopic and destructive maneuverings of plutocrats, even when he intends
nothing more than to make room for his own plutocratic plans. It takes one to
know one, and the other plutocrats loathe him, but they deserve him because
they’ve never been able to reconcile their pious claims to uphold virtuous,
patriotic, ordered republican liberty with their lust to ride tides of
casino-like financing and predatory marketing that are dissolving republican
virtues and sovereignty, tides that Trump himself rides as deftly as they do.
Nightmares of the ‘polite’ elites
Donald Trump has enough votes to become nominee of Republican Party for President of the United States. Day 2 of the Republican National Convention, July 19, 2016. J. Scott Applewhite / AP/Press Association. All rights reserved.Stunned by the sheer audacity of hopelessness in his insults
and boasts, political and business leaders have finally become alarmed.
Fashionable though it was only weeks ago to disparage Trump’s early victories
by remarking that no one has ever gone broke underestimating the intelligence
of the American people, it’s obvious now that Republican and Democratic
elites are going broke by underestimating the angry, embittered
intelligence of millions of Americans who’ve voted for Trump so far and the
millions more who would do so in a general election.
Whether or not they’ll keep flocking to him, they’re
deserting both political parties and the airless ideologies of the think tanks
and their journals, whose directors cast the voters as fools and blame one
another for his rise: The day after Mitt Romney condemned Trump, the New York
Times editorial board, which loathes Trump, condemned Romney, and The Wall
Street Journal, which loathes Trump, too, ran a column by former Louisiana
Gov. Bobby Jindal charging that he is really a creation of President
Obama.
Who are the fools here? Trump is a fraud and a demagogue,
but none of these handwringers has faced his or her own side’s complicity in
the casino-like financing, omnivorous marketing, and other modulations of greed
that have made his demagoguery alluring by pumping distress and heartbreak into
American life. Nor has either side grasped history’s cunning well enough to
understand the irony that it’s a premiere financier of casinos and an
omnivorous self-marketer who is approaching the threshold of the presidency.
Narcissistic and opportunistic though Trump’s political heterodoxy
is, it has shredded the credibility of conservatives who fantasize about
restoring the capitalism of William McKinley, let alone that of Adam Smith and
John Locke, and it has sucked the wind out of the sails of leftists who
fantasize that a precariat-proletariat will rise again. Although he was
right enough to call Trump a fraud, Romney and his cohort would have to become
a lot less fraudulent themselves to discredit him or whoever his successor will
be if he implodes.
Trump, of course, is pumping something still worse. He’s no
Hamilton or Madison, struggling to devise an order capable of balancing
wealth-making with power-wielding and truth-seeking. He’s no Lincoln,
envisioning a new birth of freedom, no Teddy Roosevelt birthing a “new nationalism”
more ecumenical and progressive than anything Europe ever dreamed of, and no
FDR cobbling together a New Deal. The problem is that none of the claimants to
any of these legacies seems fit to dive into the abyss Trump has opened and
face the demons in it and in himself. Instead, the other candidates have been
pirouetting at the edge of the abyss, putting on clown shows and freak shows.
Hence the eruption of public rage against these would-be
Good Shepherds and the consultants and scribbling minions who’ve widened the
abyss. Neoliberals thought they could
triangulate between right and left and restore order to America along
Singaporean, state-capitalist lines with democratic grace notes. But, in
Trump’s hands, “Right before our eyes, like something on the screen, the vast
social fabric [of the republic] has crumbled…. On its ruins, with the speed of
a world’s fair, [he] and his confederates have run up a political front of
startling and provocative modernity… [His movement’s] hand has been so much
quicker than the democratic eye, and for his violence we have so little
precedent.”
Again, this is Hackett in 1941, but American elites have
been clearing the ground for Trump’s great encampment, as Romney was doing by
calling millions of Americans “takers” in 2012 and “suckers” last week. Takers
and suckers some of them may be, but many are also shrewd, angry, bitter, and
desperate. Although he was right enough to call Trump a fraud, Romney and his
cohort would have to become a lot less fraudulent themselves to discredit him
or whoever his successor will be if he implodes.
Trump is an all-too American carrier of a chronic
dysfunction that was lathered into our economic and social foundations and that
cracked the country open in 1860, when the Whig Party collapsed amid a
no-longer deferrable dispute over slavery and states’ rights, and in 1929, when
the Republican classical economic and political liberalism that “translates
pretty easily into… a sanction for popular impatience with governmental
restraints on greed,” as the late historian Edmund Morgan put it, brought the
country pretty close to implosion as fascism was rising in Europe.
So, Trump-as-Hitler is really only the match lighting the
tinder that many of us have prepared – the Clintons and the Chuck Schumers
among us as much as the Bushes and Mitch McConnells, the “lemonade literati” of
the prestige magazines as much as the Dinesh D’Souzas and Ann Coulters. We
should stop flattering ourselves long enough to understand why so many of our
fellow citizens are willing to gamble so pathetically that Trump will deflect
the torrentially marketed civic mindlessness and malevolence that’s groping
them, goosing them, intimidating them, bamboozling them, indebting them,
surveilling them, and, in so doing, imprisoning them.
Trump and the seductions of tyranny
Donald Trump, February, 2016, Manchester,N.H. David Goldman / Press Association. All rights reserved.Reckoning with this hard reality in the conservative
National Review’s symposium “Against Trump,” R.R.Reno, editor of
the conservative religious magazine First Things, noted that the people Romney
dismissed as “’takers’ with no future in the global economy” made him the
“failed candidate” that Trump calls him now.
“They suspect, rightly,” that the Chamber of Commerce will
sell them down the river if it adds to the bottom line,” Reno adds. “I suppose
that that’s the reason for [Trump’s] popularity… The middle class consensus in
America has collapsed. This is the most important political and social
earthquake since World War II. The conservative movement’s leadership isn’t up
to the challenge, and a good number of voters are willing to gamble on Trump’s
bluster.”
Reno stops short of acknowledging that the “middle-class
consensus” owed a lot to massive public support for homeownership, to vigorous
government regulations that supported union organizing and restrained the
animal spirits of bankers, brokers, and campaign donors, and to the G.I. Bill
and other extensive public funding of universities. From the 1970s on,
Democratic and Republican elites have seduced Americans into surrendering those
supports bit by bit. Although there were valid reasons (such as global and
technological upheavals) to re-work some protections and let go of others,
there were far too many corrupt and destructive reasons, too.
The reckoning we’re experiencing, although it’s being
distorted by Trump, is about what political and business leaders on both sides
of the aisle (and the Atlantic) deserve. At Hilton Head and Davos, they tell
one another, sometimes with stagey caveats and sighs, that recent meltdowns
prove that most people aren’t capable of self-government and need to be ruled
or finessed.
Today’s elites cannot even rule themselves, let alone anyone
else. And the armed, racist American goons and drooling fools circling liberal
democracy’s proverbial town meetings in our nightmares don’t even nearly
represent Trump’s other supporters, many of whom aren’t so different from many
of the rest of us. Even the goons and fools weren’t born to do what they’re
doing now, nor were they all disposed to do it back on the playground. The
quiet little stabs of heartbreak and self-doubt that accumulated in tiny
increments in their young lives as parents lost jobs, pensions, homes, mutual
respect, and public moral standing have blossomed into open resentment that is
seeking the right target.
Their losses had many causes, but one seldom mentioned is
that too many of us writers, perhaps including some who are reading this, have
ignored or dismissed or disdained Trump’s supporters, compounded their distress
with turns of a phrase, clicks of our brokers’ mouses, arching our eyebrows in
faint but unforgotten disdain, or simple civic inattention excised with
stereotypes, and, occasionally, empty shrugs and solicitous sighs over
depictions of Bubba’s distress. Their losses had many causes, but one seldom mentioned is
that too many of us writers, perhaps including some who are reading this, have
ignored or dismissed or disdained Trump’s supporters.
Last May, in one of the more revelatory columns I’ve seen
about what’s happened to the Republican base, Thomas Edsall recalled that “In the fall of
1969, Merle Haggard topped the Billboard country charts for four weeks with
“Okie from Muskogee,” the song that quickly became the anthem of red America,
even before we called it that.”
“’We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee, we don’t take our
trips on LSD, we don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street, we like livin’
right and bein’ free,’ Haggard declared. ‘We don’t make a party out of lovin’,
we like holdin’ hands and pitchin’ woo.’”
“Times have changed,” Edsall observed. “Today Muskogee,
Oklahoma, a city of 38,863, has nine drug treatment centers and a court
specifically devoted to drug offenders. A search for “metamphetamine
arrest” on the website of the Muskogee Phoenix, the local newspaper,
produces 316 hits.
“In 2013 just under two-thirds of the births in the
city of Muskogee, 62.6 percent, were to unwed mothers, including 48.3
percent of the births to white mothers. The teenage birthrate in Oklahoma was
47.3 per 1,000; in Muskogee, it’s 59.2, almost twice the national rate, which is
29.7.”
Almost as if Edsall were anticipating the irony that people
being fleeced by casino financing and predatory marketing have wound up
lionizing a financer of casinos and a predatory marketer, he noted that
“Muskogee County voted decisively for Ronald Reagan in 1984 and for Republican
presidential candidates in the last three elections. In 2012, Romney beat
Obama 57.4 to 42.6.”
In another, even-more substantial column called “Why
Trump Now,” Edsall notes that “the share of the gross national product going to
labor as opposed to… capital fell from 68.8 percent in 1970 to 60.7 percent by
2013” and that the number of manufacturing jobs dropped by 36 percent, from
19.3 million in 1979 to 12.3 million in 2015, while the population increased by
43 percent, from 225 million to 321 million.
“In other words, the economic basis for voter anger has been
building over forty years,” including the stagnation of net upward mobility
after 2000 and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, which has
“imposed far larger costs on American workers than most economists
anticipated.”
Then came the financial collapse of 2008, “which many people
left and right felt was caused by reckless financial engineering on Wall
Street” and which left those who’d not “benefited from the previous boom years”
to become “easy pickings for populist rhetoric” because “trust in government
was destroyed” by a “widespread sense that all the elites in Washington and New
York conspired to bail out the miscreants who caused the disaster and then gave
them bonuses, while the rest of us lost our houses or saw their value, the
biggest and often only asset of Americans, plummet, lost our jobs or saw them
frozen and stagnant, and then saw gaping inequality grow even more.”
In 2010, the Citizens United ruling invited the miscreants
to inundate the public decision-making processes and institutions through which
citizens are supposed to decide how to license and regulate and channel the
very forces that are enslaving us. The excuse for Citizens United was that, as
Mitt Romney would put it in 2012, “Corporations are people/ too,” entitled to
the same freedoms of speech that citizens enjoy. “If dancing nude and
burning the flag are protected by the First Amendment, why would it not protect
robust speech about the people who are running for office?’’ asked Theodore
Olson, counsel for Citizens United, the corporation that produced the movie to
swift-boat Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.
The subtext: Let people rant, as long as we can drown them
out with expensive megaphones and words that titillate or intimidate while they
get laryngitis from straining to be heard, and while we buy off or intimidate
their public officials at election time. “A Bloomberg poll found that 78
percent of voters would like to see Citizens United overturned,” Edsall notes,
“and this view held across a range of partisan loyalties: Republicans at 80
percent; Democrats at 83; and independents at 71.”
The volcano rumbles
Donald Trump, greets the crowd, July, 2016, in Cincinnati.John Minchillo / Press Association. All rights reserved. Some of us saw this coming in 2008, even as the Republican
National Convention of that year nominated the decent if limited man whom Trump
mocked this year for having been captured in Vietnam. On the 2008 convention
floor John McCain faced a somewhat unnervingly large contingent of young white
men whose repertoire of political expression consisted solely of shouting
"Yoo Es Ay! Yoo Es Ay! Yoo Es Ay! " – a chant we’re hearing often
again this week.
There was something manic and clueless about it then, as
there is even more so now. In 2008 McCain seemed annoyed by it. He knew only
too well the perils of flaunting heroism, as George W. Bush had done in his
empty flight-deck, “Mission Accomplished” landing of 2004. Politicians overplay
that card when they have little else to run on. McCain knew better than to do
that, but Fred Thompson, in a recorded voice-over in the convention hall,
thundered that "When you've lived in a box, your life is about keeping
others from having to live in that box.”
"Yoo Es Ay! Yoo Es Ay! Yoo Es Ay!" the crowd
roared.
McCain said that he respects and admires Senator Obama and
that "Despite our differences, we are all Americans. That's an association
that means more to me than any other."
"Yoo Es Ay! Yoo Es Ay! Yoo Es Ay!" the crowd
chanted, though a bit less vigorously than before, as if less sure of what it
was cheering.
The uncertainty vanished when a few demonstrators who'd
sneaked into the convention hall rose during McCain’s speech and shouted out
protests until security guards hustled them out. The disruption was barely
audible in the cavernous hall and might have gone virtually unnoticed on TV, as
the media kept focusing on the podium, had not “the guys” decided to counter
the protesters by chanting, "Yoo Es Ay! You Es Ay! You Es Ay!",
interrupting McCain far more obviously than the demonstrators had. It was then
that a look of annoyance crossed his face. Where was the leadership on the
convention floor? Who were these guys, anyway?
All that misplaced fervor and rage reflected a lot more than
young men's hormones and older men's uneasy consciences. These guys’ buffoonish,
boorish chanting was only one side of them. They hadn't all curdled into
fascists or even racists. A thwarted decency and clueless love in them, a
yearning for something slipping away, was struggling to find some political
defense against the affronts and distortions their love had suffered.
In 1990, in The Closest of Strangers, I predicted that
“the disintegration of white working-class family life, replete with the
pathologies of violent essentially homeless youths,… may well overshadow the
problems of the black underclass in the popular mind in the years ahead.” Now,
25 years later, encroachments on their freedom and dignity have generated not
only family breakdown and drug abuse in places like Muskogee but countless
other stresses and humiliations that erupt in road rage, lethal rampages at
store openings on sale days; extreme fighting or cage fighting, the
gladitorialization of college and professional sports, and escapist,
demoralizing entertainments, including reality TV and Trump’s own show The
Apprentice, which ran for nine seasons.
Not surprisingly, these profit-driven come-ons are
accompanied by exaggerations or fabrications of enemies and scapegoats and with
justifications for fighting them in the Iraq War and crusades against
subversive monsters in our midst. Soon enough, those monsters include kids from
places like Muskogee, eager to slay the dragons with variations of the armed
violence I’ve mentioned.
And how much human history and psychology need one know to
see that when demoralization and slavery like this are deftly managed, they can
become almost as seductive as they are painful? How many Americans now enact
subtly internalized humiliations and cravings for vengeance sexually,
eroticizing pain instead of challenging its sources? How many Internet ventures
are hollowing out children’s sense of themselves as sexual beings and reasoning
citizens capable of political deliberation and action?
Under banners of “free speech,” this market-corrupted and
soul-corrupting “culture” is inundating us not mainly with artists' art,
activists' appeals, or other creative or political offerings but with messages
from anonymous announcers and decorators and corporate "sensors" (not
censors) that have been designed to bypass our brains and hearts on their way
to our lower viscera and wallets.
The more that these relentless, demoralizing pressures
reduce sovereign citizens to chasing vapid consumer sovereignty, the more we’re
like flies trapped in a spider’s web of those 800-numbered, sticky-fingered
pick-pocketing lenders, insurers, pharmaceutical producers, and other swirling
whorls of anonymous shareholders whose managers are dissolving our freedoms,
not out of malevolence or conspiracy but out of mindless, mandated, greed.
And the more impoverished and imprisoned we become, the more
we resort to palliatives in pills, vials, syringes and empty spectacles that
leave us too ill to bear our sicknesses or their cures, capable only of
occasional, mob-like eruptions and cries for a strongman who boasts that,
having already bought the politicians whose deregulatory excesses and corporate
welfare payments have stupefied and imprisoned America, he can “fire” them.
Trump’s supporters even imagine that he’s their megaphone
against Citizens United’s rich beneficiaries. But if he wins, they’ll have a
let-down too wrenching and violent for the American republic to bear. They may
end up doubting that the republic deserves to survive at all. Meanwhile,
though, these people whom elites dismiss as knuckle-dragging, featherbedding
racists are giving a new twist to the old Gospel line, "God gave Noah
the rainbow sign, no more water but fire next time".
The volcano erupts
Melania Trump on Day 1 of Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Matt Rourke / Press Association. All rights reserved. “Mr. Trump’s brand of resentment politics,” as New York
Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns called it, rides what’s known
as ressentiment, (in French it’s
pronounced “ruh-sohn-tee-mohn”), a public psychopathology in
which gnawing insecurities, envy, and hatreds nursed by many people in private
converge in public in scary social eruptions that present themselves as noble
crusades but that diminish their participants even in seeming to make them big.
In ressentiment,
the little-big man seeks enemies on whom to wreak vengeance for frustrations
that are only half-acknowledged because they come from his exploitation by
powers he’s afraid to challenge head on. No wonder that the 2012 Republican
National Convention roared with such delight as Clint Eastwood interrogated an
empty chair symbolizing an invisible President Obama. No one wanted to know
what Eastwood would have dared to say to the real Obama or what the President
would have said back. No one wanted to know what Eastwood would have dared to
say to the real Obama or what the President would have said back.
Ressentiment thus warps the
little-big man’s assessments of his hardships and opportunities. The same
George W. Bush who Trump supporters once thought they’d enjoy having a beer
with perpetrated and enabled massive frauds on them. They can barely admit
this, but they’re determined not to let it happen again. Their problem is that
they don’t know enough, aren’t independent and well organized enough, and lack
sufficient resources to prevent it. Ressentiment
perverts their efforts by stoking and misdirecting their frustrations. Whether
it erupts in a medieval Inquisition, a Puritan or McCarthyite witch hunt, a
Maoist Cultural Revolution, nihilist extremes of “people’s liberation
movements” such as the Khmer Rouge, or a strain of political correctness that
grips a particular community, ressentiment’s most
telling symptoms are always paranoia, scapegoating and bursts of hysteria
violence.
That syndrome was described more recently by George Soros in
an assessment of “the power of
Orwell's Newspeak” and “the aversion of the public to facing harsh realities”
in America today:
"On the one hand,” Soros writes, “Newspeak is extremely
difficult to contradict because it incorporates and thereby preempts its own
contradiction, as when Fox News calls itself fair and balanced. Another trick
is to accuse your opponent of the behavior of which you are guilty, like Fox
News accusing me of being the puppet master of a media empire. Skillful
practitioners always attack the strongest point of their opponent, like the
Swiftboat ads attacking John Kerry's Vietnam War record. Facts do not provide
any protection, and rejecting an accusation may serve to have it repeated; but
ignoring it can be very costly, as John Kerry discovered in the 2004 election.
"On the other hand, the pursuit of truth has lost much
of its appeal.” But why? In 1941, Hackett noted that people who are stressed, humiliated,
and dispossessed become easy prey for demagogic orchestrations of “the casual
fact, the creative imagination, the will to believe, and, out of these three
elements, a counterfeit reality to which there was a violent, instinctive
response. For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as
powerfully to fiction as they do to realities, and that in many cases they help
to create the very fictions to which they respond. The fiction is taken for
truth because the fiction is badly needed.”
Ressentiment’s gusts of collective
passion touch raw nerves under the ministrations of demagogues and an
increasingly surreal journalism that prepares the way for them by brutalizing
public discourse. In the 1976 movie Network, which depicts the profit-driven
derangement of television news reporting, manager Diana Christiansen tells her
staff, “I want angry shows” because Americans want “a mad prophet, denouncing
the hypocrisies of our time.” A demagogic network anchor rouses his viewers to
shout, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more,” even as he
herds them like sheep. Ressentiment’s gusts of collective passion touch raw
nerves under the ministrations of demagogues and an increasingly surreal
journalism that prepares the way for them by brutalizing public discourse.
A year after that movie appeared, Rupert Murdoch bought the
liberal tabloid New York Post, imported his savvy Aussie journalism mates as
editors, and began mugging and/or titillating the city’s body politic,
beginning with a lurid series on the serial murder “Son of Sam.” Now the New
York Post is a virtual press office for Trump’s presidential bid, as vulgar and
relentless as the candidate himself.
When ressentiment is
only beginning to gather strength, it assumes disguises of civility at first,
so as not to incur decisive reproach from a public that isn’t yet too weakened
to ward off the disease. Soros cites Fox News’ winking assurance that it’s
“fair and balanced,” a signal to the little-big man that Together we’ll crush
those pious, hypocritical liberal journalists who prattle on about objectivity
and fairness.
Drip, drip, drip: story after story teaches viewers and
readers to fear and mistrust one another, souring the spirit of trust and
curiosity that sustain democratic dialogue into the cynicism and defensiveness
that clear the way for the strongman. Ressentiment’s
gloves really come off once there are enough angry little-big men (and
little-big women, of course) to step out together en masse, with a Sarah Palin or a Glenn Beck. And now Trump is
leading little-big man across the Rubicon, signaling that he’ll mow down anyone
and anything in his way.
The legitimate grievances fueling ressentiment sometimes drive its eruptions to a fleeting
brilliance, as when Palin tapped deeply into currents of thwarted love and hope
in her speech to the 2008 convention with. But, like her public persona, such
gestures soon curdle and collapse, tragi-comically or catastrophically, into
their own cowardice, ignorance, and lies.
Where to? Can Trump play Augustus, not Hitler?
Enter Rome’s first emperor, Augustus Caesar, who, let us
remember, was much on the minds of the American republic’s founders. Gibbon
wrote that “a slow and secret poison” had entered “the vitals of the empire,”
sapping from citizens “that public courage which is nourished by the love of
independence, the sense of national honor, the presence of danger, and the
habit of command.” In time, “They received laws and governors from the will of
their sovereign, and trusted for their defense to a mercenary army.” “History
does not more clearly point out any fact than this, that nations which have
lapsed from liberty, to a state of slavish subjection, have been brought to
this unhappy condition, by gradual paces,” wrote the American founder Richard
Henry Lee. Benjamin Franklin voted for the Constitution in 1787, he warned that
it “can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the
People shall have become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being
incapable of any other.” Crafting stories that people can love
without hating requires the seasoned narrative and political strengths that
Madison, Hamilton… the two presidents
Roosevelt, Gandhi, Mandela, King, Havel, and others have had in abundance and
that Trump does not.
Conservatives need to acknowledge that the reverential, or
republican, or corporate strains in capitalism described by Adam Smith, John
Locke, Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, Clinton Rossiter, and others have been
transformed almost beyond recognition by casino-like financing, omnivorous
marketing, and worse. only radically different arrangements can give
classically liberal freedom, let alone “free enterprise,” a chance to live
another day.
The time for being right only about how the other side is wrong
has passed. Trump, the opportunist, seems to see this more clearly than many of
his critics on the right and left. No wonder so many people flock to him. But
challenging what markets and free enterprise have become and re-crediting
democracy instead of crimping it would require a national effort more “yuuuge” and inspiring than anything that
Trump would or could lead.
Trump is betting that Americans cannot help but love and
believe in his “Make America Great Again” nationalism. He wants us to love him
as its savior, even though, in “getting things done,” he’d crush our democratic
opportunities. He’s credible only because our current, corrupted regime already
crushes so many such initiatives and needs to be shaken to its roots and
reconfigured. It will require more than idolizing a deal-maker who already
idolizes himself.
Democratic movements have benefitted from knowing some
history, from having some clear principles, and from finding ways to weave
enough mutual commitment and trust to stick together against obstacles and
allurements that seem insuperable. Crafting stories that people can love
without hating requires the seasoned narrative and political strengths that
Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson, Washington, Lincoln, the two presidents
Roosevelt, Gandhi, Mandela, King, Havel, and others have had in abundance and
that Trump does not. Who knows if good citizens and wise leaders can weave
a new social fabric now? One of history’s encouraging lessons is that, time and
again, they have. We’re about to find out if they can again.
Augustus of Prima Porta, Ist century, Vatian Museum. Wikicommons/ Till Niermann. Some rights reserved.